Why the Seclution?

Since the Census is coming up, there are various groups in the class doing stories on it. My take on it is what the Census is doing in order to get Liberty City to have a greater turnout since the last count. During research some of the things I found have been somewhat confusing.

According to Brad Brown, a volunteer for the NAACP for various years now, Liberty City only had a 10 percent turnout since the last census. He said that many people were illegal immigrants and that one of their efforts was to educate on the confidentiality of the census and the benefits of having yourself count. Liberty City had the lowest turnout from all it's neighboring communities.

Reasearch led to finding out that all the communities around Liberty City had at least one official census office where different services were offered. The offices work by covering zip codes not particular boundaries. I called different offices with scattered zip codes from the general areas of the city. I tried looking for a zip code at the heart of the city as well as the outskirts.

These were the zip codes:

33168

33127

33142

33147

33150

With the exception of the first one, which is in the borderline of two offices the rest of the codes are covered by the "Miami East" office which is located at Biscayne and 47th St. That's not even on the border line of the city! Now I ask again why the isolation?





The census talks about making it easy and accesable for people to fill out the form, why then would there only be one office to cover one whole city and on top of that it's on the edge? What about the people that don't have cars or the older generations who can't be taking two or three different buses to get there?

Confusing. An organization whose whole purpose is to count and go out and gather those whom don't want to make the effort. Why then not implement more offices or a stronger tactic or plan to get the word out?

The NAACP is doing some outreach programs through churches and groups to get in touch with the community about the importance of the census. By law the census has to be in by April 1st, that's about a month and a half away, and at this stage of the game I trully think it will have to take a whole lot more than that.

Below is a better map of the Miami East office:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=++Miami+East+NW+72nd+Street+Miami,+FL+33150&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=31.839416,56.513672&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=NW+72nd+St,+Miami,+Miami-Dade,+Florida+33150&ll=25.84028,-80.20659&spn=0.008826,0.013797&z=16